Mind the Gap

Abstract

Historically, Whites have scored higher than Blacks on most measures of literacy (referred to as the Black-White literacy gap). The authors outline the historic social inequities that contributed to the Black-White literacy gap as well as the current school and home environment that may maintain it. They then examine the current state of the Black-White literacy gap using data from the primary instrument that the U.S. Department of Education uses to assess adult literacy: the 1992 National Assessment of Literacy Survey and the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy. Their analysis shows that (a) the adult Black-White literacy gap decreased between 1992 and 2003, although is still sizable; (b) Blacks and Whites garner equal gains from advancing in educational attainment; (c) there was little evidence of a reduction in Black-White literacy gaps within educational attainment levels, and (d) there was significant evidence of more Blacks moving up the educational attainment ladder. This pattern of data suggests that the decrease in the overall Black-White literacy gap was significantly influenced by Blacks' achievement of higher levels of educational attainment.Keywords education, adult literacy, achievement gap, NAAL, affirmative action 124 Journal of Literacy Research 44(2)Policy makers, researchers, and educators have historically considered literacy a measure of the quality of education. It is only recently, however, that the U.S. government began explicitly addressing the importance of adult literacy. In 1988, the U.S. Congress asked the U.S. Department of Education to address the need for national adult literacy information (Kaestle, Campbell, Finn, Johnson, & Mikulecky, 2001). In 1992, the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) administered the first national adult literacy assessment to the U.S. population 16 and older with the National Adult Literacy Survey (NALS). In 2003, adult literacy was assessed again under its new name, the National Assessment of Adult Literacy (NAAL; Kutner, Greenberg, Jin, Boyle, Hsu, & Dunleavy, 2007). The NAAL was designed so that its data were directly comparable to the NALS. 1 The 1992 NALS and the 2003 NAAL represent the most comprehensive assessments of adult literacy in the United States.Historically, Whites have outperformed Blacks on most measures of literacy (Hedges & Nowell, 1998), which will be referred to as the Black-White literacy gap. 2The Black-White literacy gap grew out of differences in educational attainment (i.e., the highest degree of education an individual has completed) between the Black and White populations. Differences in educational attainment grew out of racial oppression. In the present article, we examine the Black-White literacy gap in detail using data from the 1992 NALS and the 2003 NAAL. In particular, (a) we assess whether the size of the Black-White literacy gap changed from 1992 to 2003, and (b) if changes occur, we examine the source of those changes, with a specific emphasis on how they rel...

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